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Dr. Fredrik Moberg, Editor
FEATURE:
< < War & the Environment
IN BRIEF:
World Bank's Statistics
Still Lack High-Quality Sustainability Measures
Biodiversity
crucial for achieving Millennium Development Goals
WAR & THE ENVIRONMENT
The war may be won, now it’s time to win the peace. Rebuilding a country after a war is not only about reconstructing health services, roads, ports, airports and schools. It is also about cleaning up the environment and restoring damaged ecosystems to secure the future supply of natural resources and ecosystem services needed for filtering air and water, ensuring food supply, and providing erosion control and fertile soil.
Oil wells on fire in Kuwait during the first Gulf War in 1991. According to one estimate that war caused environmental damage costing $40 billion.
War causes human suffering and grief. People are killed or wounded, made homeless, hungry and thirsty. Families are separated, education systems collapse and the mental health of civilians and soldiers is seriously harmed. It might seem ridiculous to worry about the damage war does to the environment, to ecosystems and their animal species. However, human suffering caused by war is often prolonged by environmental destruction. After a war, rebuilding is necessary—not only for buildings, roads, railways, the education system and health care, but also for ecosystems. A country recovering from war must restore drinking water supplies, damaged wetlands, agriculture, forests, lakes and the marine environment as ecological and economic recovery is often linked. “One can easily clean up the language of war—‘collateral damage, friendly fire, smart bombs’—but cleaning up the environmental consequences is a far tougher task… too often the impact on the Earth’s life support systems is ignored,” notes Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Direct and indirect environmental effects
We have all seen the black fumes from burning oil wells on television. These
fires are undoubtedly causing harm to people and polluting the region’s
ecosystems. In addition, there are other kinds of pollution due to oil spills
and hazardous waste leaking from damaged industries, destruction of sewage
treatment plants, and much more. The war in Iraq has placed a great environmental
burden on a region with already fragile ecosystems and where about 20 percent
of the population lacked access to clean drinking water even before the war.
In addition to the direct activities involved in waging war, there are often
severe environmental effects caused by resource plunder in the wake of war,
or in order to finance it. This has been the case in several extended internal
wars in Africa.
According to one estimate, the 1991Gulf War caused environmental damage costing $40 billion. Iraqi forces destroyed more than seven hundred oil wells when fleeing from Kuwait, leading to soil and water contamination still remaining ten years afterwards. According to the World Resources Institute, burning wells released nearly half a billion tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. This burning alone made Iraq the ninth largest polluting country in 1991. Oil, soot, sulphur and acid rain fell as far as 1,900 kilometres away, poisoning plants and animals, contaminating water and choking people. Average air temperatures in the region were reported to have dropped by almost ten degrees Celsius due to smoke from the burning oil that reduced sunlight.
Four million barrels of oil were released into the Persian Gulf, affecting large areas of the coastline. The destruction of sewage treatment plants resulted in large fish kills due to the discharge of more than 50 millions litres of untreated sewage water into Kuwait Bay every day during the war and its aftermath. The marine environment suffered from oil spills, shading from the smoke, and a sea surface microlayer made toxic to plankton and the larvae of marine organisms. Worse still, the sea temperatures dropped. Birds, otters, dugongs and prawn fisheries were severely affected. In 1991-92 total biomass in the Saudi Arabian prawn stock was only a quarter of pre-war levels. Wars also pose a serious threat to biodiversity. For instance, several Iraqi wetlands are of international importance as a staging and wintering area for waterfowl. The Gulf and Sea of Oman region is home to several important marine turtle habitats with five out of the seven of the world’s marine turtle species.
Another war-related environmental problem now gaining media attention is damage from depleted uranium (DU), used in projectiles designed to pierce armour. UNEP is now investigating the effects from weapons containing DU in Iraq. Previous UNEP assessments in Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina concluded that radiation levels were low and did not threaten human health or the environment, but they also noted that many scientific uncertainties remain. Many blame DU ammunition for causing birth defects in children in the Gulf area and “Gulf War Syndrome” in veterans.
Agent Orange in Vietnam
Agent Orange was one of many herbicides used during the Vietnam War by USA
in the 1960’s to kill plants and leaves, which provided cover for their
enemies. However, Agent Orange was also contaminated with TCDD, or dioxin,
an environmentally persistent compound. TCDD has since been linked to several
types of cancer and reproductive problems in both humans and animals. According
to one estimate, defoliants eliminated 50% of the mangrove forests in Vietnam
and had serious effects on the wildlife population. Recently, a study published
in the prestigious scientific journal Nature found that the total amount of
dioxin sprayed during the war was up to four times as great as was previously
estimated.
Environmental problems causing conflicts
War is among the leading causes of concentrated environmental destruction,
but unsustainable use of natural resources and degraded natural ecosystems
can also cause conflicts, directly or indirectly. There are several examples
where frustration and lost livelihood due to resource degradation have led
to conflicts that may at first glance seem to be ethnic or religious in nature.
Several analysts have suggested that most conflicts in Africa in the future
are likely to be over water. The Nile River is a likely setting for such conflicts
as populations grow and available fresh water per capita decreases. Although
international wars over water have not yet occurred, lack of water has already
led to several localised conflicts.
The Rwanda conflict, often considered a textbook case of ethnic conflict, has today been redefined by many analysts as having a more complex origin. Analysts emphasise the underlying causes of such conflict, such as population growth, land scarcity, soil erosion, and unequal land distribution and access to resources.
Economic and ecological recovery linked
The links between ecology and economy, and environmental sustainability and
development, are increasingly recognised in the international development
community. The environment is not only something we can afford to care about
when we become sufficiently rich. It provides goods and services that sustain
development, so after a war, goals to combat disease, poverty and hunger must
not come at the expense of the environment. Environmental concerns must therefore
be part of any strategy to rebuild a country and promote sustainable development.
“Economic and ecological recovery will be linked. Preparing for both
is the only way to improve the lives of Iraqis,” Jonathan Lash, president
of the World Resources Institute noted. “Rapid action to repair environmental
damage can often support humanitarian relief efforts in vital ways,”
said UNEP’s Klaes Toepfer. Actually, the United Nations’ recent
US$2.2 billion appeal for emergency assistance to Iraq during the coming six
months will provide money for several environment-related activities. One
activity that will probably be prioritised is the restoration of the degraded
Mesopotamian Marshlands in southern Iraq. These marshes have been home to
human communities for five millennia and sustain two-thirds of west Asia's
wintering wildfowl, 11 globally-threatened bird species and 3 globally-threatened
mammal species. Owing to upstream dams and drainage the marshlands have been
severely degraded. Moreover, Saddam’s troops drained the marshes and
burned villages to quell an uprising after the 1991 Gulf War. UNEP notes that
about 90% of the circa 20,000 square kilometres of marshlands have been lost,
making this one of the greatest environmental disasters in history.
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WORLD BANK'S STATISTICS STILL LACK HIGH-QUALITY SUSTAINABILITY MEASURES
There is still a lack of adequate statistics that measure the state of the environment, according to this year’s World Development Indicators from the World Bank. But there are interesting new attempts to develop sustainability indicators.
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World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank's annual compilation of data describing development. It includes some 800 indicators about people, environment, economy, states and markets. There are several arguments for developing sustainability indicators that integrate economic and environmental aspects. However, presenting such integrated accounts can be costly and difficult, so for now we have to settle with several physical indicators and descriptive statistics that also provide useful environmental information: |
There are attempts to derive new measures of sustainability in this edition of WDI. One such measure is “adjusted net savings” (formerly called genuine savings). This measures not only national economic surplus, but also its depletion of natural resources, accumulation of pollutants, and investments in human capital. It shows that many developing countries have low or negative adjusted net savings. Some of these countries seem to perform well when looking at their Gross National Products, but have in fact "developed" by degrading their natural capital. The natural capital components of the adjusted net savings include commercial forests, oil and minerals, and the damage caused by the release of carbon dioxide. However, many other human benefits of ecosystems are not included, such as water resources, fisheries, water and air purification, flood control, erosion control, and generation of fertile soil.
The report also notes that estimates of adjusted net savings in this edition of the WDI are only a first step towards developing a sustainability indicator and should be used with caution. Nevertheless, the WDI concludes that such indicators are needed to see how far we have come in our strive to achieve the Millennium Development Goal to halve poverty by 2015: “If the vision of a world without poverty is to be realized, sustainable development is the key. And whether the world continues to sustain itself depends in large part on proper management of its natural resources.”
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"BIODIVERSITY CRUCIAL FOR ACHIEVING MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS"
Sustainable use and conservation of the world's biological diversity is crucial for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. This was concluded at the meeting “Biodiversity after Johannesburg” in London, 2-4 March.
Wetlands, like this one in Costa Rica, have high biodiversity and supply a number of natural resources and ecosystem services to humans. Photo: Nils Kautsky
Biodiversity is essential to halve severe poverty and improve human health, food production and water supply. This was concluded at “Biodiversity after Johannesburg” a meeting with more than 160 participants from government, international organisations, NGO’s, academia and the private sector. It was one of the first major follow-up meetings to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg last summer.
Conserving biodiversity is not only a matter of protecting species in remote nature reserves. It is about safeguarding natural systems that regulate climate, form soil, pollinate crops, cleanse air, filter water and provide medicines and raw materials for countless goods. The World Summit did recognize that biodiversity is a development issue, but biodiversity issues are still under-represented in the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework, said Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to the UN Secretary-General. Klaus Toepfer, UNEP’s Executive Director, added that the capacity of ecosystems to produce goods and services is “essential for meeting human needs, and ultimately influence the development prospects of nations…when that capacity is diminished, the most serious toll is exacted on the poor who are the most vulnerable to floods or crop failures.”
Jeffrey McNeely, of The World Conservation Union (IUCN), summarised the meeting by underscoring that biodiversity is in fact intimately related to all of the MDG’s. He reminded that biodiversity gives us the ability to adapt to changing conditions in the future and noted that the benefits of biodiversity often fail to reach the poor. Finally he stressed the need for strengthened political support for biodiversity conservation and called for economic indicators of unsustainable consumption.
The meeting was organised by a number of organisations, including the Equator Initiative, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Department For International Development (DFID). It was the first of two meetings in London dealing with the linkages between biodiversity and sustainable development. The second meeting will take place in May.
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